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At Rosh ha-Shanah, Poignant Memories of Holidays Past

ROSH HA-SHANAH, the Jewish New Year, which begins Friday evening, is a time for prayer and reflection, and for the familiar aromas of traditional recipes. This year, the holiday's poignancy and sense of history are enhanced with the publication of ''In Memory's Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin.''

Originally written in German by women at Terezin (Theresienstadt), the ghetto and concentration camp in what was then Czechoslovakia, ''In Memory's Kitchen'' is a record of the lives these starving women left behind -- the flavors, feasts, even the pots and pans. With recipes, poems and personal letters, it is also a story of the survival of the spirit amid the horrors of the Holocaust.

In an effort to endure the hours of hunger, cold and terror at the camp, an anteroom to Auschwitz, Mina Pachter and other women carefully, sometimes painfully, wrote out about 80 recipes, using what pen or pencil and paper they could find, and later sewed together the pages.

Of the nearly 140,000 prisoners who passed through the camp, about 33,000 died at Terezin from illness and malnutrition, and 88,000 from Terezin were killed at Auschwitz.

''In the book the women concretized their memories of the world to which they might never return,'' said Dr. Michael Berenbaum, the director of the Research Institute of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, who wrote the foreword to ''In Memory's Kitchen'' (Jason Aronson, $25). ''It also shows that their way of coping with starvation was to think of wonderful food. One survivor I met said to me, 'You needed an imagination to survive.' Some women would transport themselves from the world of Terezin into the kitchens of Prague and Berlin and the tables filled with joyous family, loving husbands and rattling children.''

The cookbook would have been lost if Mrs. Pachter, who died in Terezin on Yom Kippur in 1944, had not entrusted it, along with her poems and letters, to a friend, asking him to give these keepsakes to her daughter, Anny Stern, who had left for Palestine in the late 1930's. After the war, the friend gave the book to a cousin who was going to Israel and asked him to find Mrs. Stern. But by then, she and her family had immigrated to the United States.

Some 25 years later, in the late 1960's, Mrs. Stern received a telephone call in New York from a visitor from Israel who had brought along the package from her late mother. ''I was stunned,'' she said shortly before her death earlier this year. ''I didn't touch it for four years.''

In 1991, Cara De Silva, then a reporter for New York Newsday, wrote an article about the the cookbook and took it upon herself to have the manuscript published.

''I grew up in a culturally strong Jewish household that stressed social responsibility,'' said Ms. De Silva, now a freelance food writer who specializes in ethnic cooking. ''There was no way that I could ever walk away from a project like this. And I knew that if I didn't do it, the haunting work of these women, which reinforced their identity by maintaining their traditions, would never be seen.''

Mrs. Pachter's grandson, David Stern, who translated his grandmother's poems and letters for ''In Memory's Kitchen,'' will deliver the manuscript and accompanying memorabilia to the Holocaust museum on Sept. 25, when a ceremony will be held there.

The recipes in the cookbook evoked memories of better days -- the blue-plum strudel served at Rosh ha-Shanah, with instructions to make the strudel ''high and beautiful''; Mrs. Pachter's Gesundheits Kuchen, or ''good health'' cakes traditionally taken to the mothers of newborn babies; the linzer torten eaten during Jause, the afternoon coffee hour in Vienna and Prague, and mazelokich, a layered matzoh and fruit dessert typically served by Czech Jews during the family-filled days of Passover.

Although the recipes are emotionally powerful, they are sometimes difficult to follow. The writers ''often left out an ingredient,'' said Dr. Berenbaum, the Holocaust scholar. ''I think they just couldn't do it. It showed the limits of imagination in such difficult times.''

Originally, Ms. De Silva thought this was the only such manuscript. But through research and the Holocaust Page on the Internet, she discovered five more. ''The most shattering came from a sub-camp of Mauthausen,'' she said. ''Lacking paper, the author wrote recipes on propaganda leaflets for the Third Reich, even around the face of Hitler.''

Bianca Steiner Brown, a survivor of Terezin and a former associate editor at Gourmet magazine, agreed to translate the recipes used in ''In Memory's Kitchen.'' In recalling her own time in the camp, Mrs. Brown said: ''We were thinking of bread all the time because our rations were so small. I remember once overhearing two women arguing about who baked the better cakes -- the Viennese or the Czechs. I thought then, 'Don't you have anything else to think about when we are starving for more bread?' ''

Other women lucky enough to escape the Holocaust often found in food a link to the homelands they had to abandon and in cooking a means of livelihood. One of these women is Paula Stern Kissinger, the mother of Henry A. Kissinger, the former Secretary of State. ''When we arrived in New York from Germany in 1938, I cooked out of necessity to support my family,'' said Mrs. Kissinger, who is 96 and lives in Washington Heights. ''When we arrived, my husband's English wasn't good enough for him to get a job as a high school teacher. It was still a kind of Depression here, and even certified teachers didn't have jobs. It was very depressing for him because he loved his work, so I became a private caterer, making hors d'oeuvres and desserts.''

Mrs. Kissinger was not alone. Cafes and bakeries employed World War II refugees and provided emotional as well as nutritional sustenance for immigrants by cooking familiar foods. Among them were the original Eclair Bakery on West 72d Street; the Window Shop in Cambridge, Mass.; the Jewish Bake Shop in Cincinnati, and Restaurant Elisabeth in Mexico City, all now closed. These places often became a second home for people looking for missing relatives.

Charles Guggenheim, the Academy Award-winning documentary film maker, vividly remembers, as a little boy, going to the Jewish Bake Shop in Cincinnati with his grandmother Grace Stix, one of its founders. ''I would watch these German women in their aprons making schnecken,'' he said. ''And I would wonder if the tables were turned and the American Jewish women of Cincinnati had to take refuge in a democratic Germany, could they have survived?''

5. Pour into the greased pan, and bake for 45 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the middle of the cake comes out clean. Cool in the pan for 10 minutes, then turn out and cool completely. Sprinkle the top with confectioners' sugar.

1. To make the dough, dissolve the yeast in the lukewarm water with a teaspoon of the sugar. Let sit for 10 minutes.

2. Place the butter in a saucepan with the milk. Stir over low heat until the butter is melted. Cool to lukewarm. Transfer to the bowl of an electric mixer. Add the yeast, the remaining sugar and the eggs. Gradually add the flour and salt, mix after each addition. The dough will be very sticky. Cover the mixing bowl with plastic wrap, and place the dough in the refrigerator overnight.

3. The next morning, make the filling. Begin by melting the stick of butter, and brush the bottom and sides of 3 muffin tins, each holding 12 muffins. Place 1/2 teaspoon of the brown sugar and 1 teaspoon of the honey in each tin, then add 3 almonds in the shape of a triangle.

4. Divide the dough into 3 parts, adding more flour if it is too sticky to handle. Flour a pastry board, and roll each part into a 7-by-12-inch rectangle.

5. Brush the dough with the melted butter. Sprinkle each rectangle with a third of the remaining brown sugar, walnuts, currants and cinnamon. Roll up tightly like a jelly roll.

6. Cut each roll into 12 slices about an inch wide, and place slices in the muffin tins, one of the cut sides down. Let rise, uncovered, for 1/2 hour. Brush the tops with the melted butter.

7. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Bake the schnecken for 15 minutes. Reduce the heat to 325 degrees, and continue baking for 20 minutes more or until golden. Invert onto wax paper.

1. In the large bowl of an electric mixer, using the paddle attachment, mix the flour, sugar, baking soda, cinnamon, ground cloves, ginger and salt. Add 2 of the eggs and the honey, and mix until the dough comes together. Wrap the dough in plastic, and refrigerate for two hours.

2. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

3. On a pastry board sprinkled with flour, roll out the dough to the thickness of a pencil (about 1/4 inch), and cut with a cookie cutter into 1-inch rounds. Place the dough on a greased baking sheet, leaving about 2 inches between the rounds.

4. Beat the remaining egg, and using a brush, coat the cookies. Top with half a blanched almond or walnut.